Sunday, 15 October 2017

Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 296: Thu Oct 26

Here is the Barbican introduction to this special Kino Klassika screening:
26th October 2017 is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution, one of the most important events in 20th-century history,
and one whose consequences are still being felt to this day. To mark the date, the Kino Klassika Foundation presents a screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece October (1928).
This is one of the most iconic films of the 20th century, and is
screened with a live score performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

Eisenstein’s October is an epic recreation of the events that
led to the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917. On the basis
of the success of Battleship Potemkin (1924), the film was
commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the 10th
anniversary of the Revolution. The film occupies a unique place in
Eisenstein’s work: its powerful, highly personal and controversial
propagandist images led to widespread banning, with the first screenings
in Britain only in 1935.

This is an extraordinary opportunity for London audiences to see a
newly restored version of the film screened at the Berlin Film Festival
in 2012, alongside the British premiere of a new restoration Edmund
Meisel's original 1928 score.

Chicago Reader review:Sergei Eisenstein was given a free hand and a mammoth budget to
re-create the October Revolution for its tenth anniversary (1927), but
the results displeased the authorities—for reasons both political
(Trotsky, suddenly banished from the Soviet Union, had to be hurriedly
eliminated from the final cut) and aesthetic (Eisenstein's extreme
formalism, here at its most abstract and theoretical). Much of the
montage plays better in analytical retrospect than it does on the
screen, but much of the film is genuinely stirring—when he wasn't
theorizing, the man really could cut film.
Dave Kehr